For Philadelphia’s Latino communities, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl moment is personal — and political

Emily Neil

February 7, 2026

FILE - Bad Bunny performs during his first show of his 30-date concert residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, July 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo, File)

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Some people host Super Bowl watch parties, others might even throw “Superb Owl” gatherings or “Souper Bowl” potlucks. For fans of Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, this year’s NFL championship game is known as “Benito Bowl.”

Groups and organizations across the city are hosting watch parties dedicated to the performer, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and his Super Bowl halftime show.

A week after the star made history, winning album of the year at the 68th annual Grammy Awards for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a first for a Spanish-language record, Bad Bunny is expected to shatter barriers again by delivering the first Super Bowl halftime performance either completely or mostly in Spanish.

The moment is especially poignant for Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community, said Adrián Rivera-Reyes, a co-founder and organizer with Philly Boricuas, a grassroots organization hosting its own Benito Bowl watch party on Sunday.

“To see him get to this level and be so celebrated, especially with his most recent album, which was a love letter to Puerto Rico …. It fills my heart,” he said. “It makes me feel even prouder of being Puerto Rican.”

Philadelphia is home to the second-largest Puerto Rican population of any city in the mainland United States. Rivera-Reyes said Bad Bunny’s music speaks both to Puerto Ricans living on the island and to those elsewhere in the U.S.

“His music is rooted in Puerto Rico, but that also includes the diaspora,” he said. “And so it’s a moment of having this outlet of collective joy, collective pride, to be together … but also a moment that can be leveraged as a learning opportunity about Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico’s status.”

Rivera-Reyes said his organization, in addition to celebrating the performance, will also share information about Puerto Rico’s identity and the pro-independence movement for the island, a U.S. territory since 1898. It’s a stance Bad Bunny aligned with when he backed the Puerto Rican Independence Party candidate in Puerto Rico’s 2024 gubernatorial elections.

Puerto Ricans, while U.S. citizens, are “a colonized people,” Rivera-Reyes said, and Bad Bunny’s performance as a Puerto Rican and a Latino is “a really powerful message in this moment.”

That message also resonates for Latinos in Philadelphia who are not Puerto Rican, said Darly Santelises, founder of Del Cora Collective, which is hosting a Benito Bowl watch party at Percy Diner & Bar on Sunday.

Bad Bunny’s performance in Spanish is powerful, she said, as is his outspoken criticism of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.

“Just being able to feel seen in this moment, where we as Latinos, even if we’re documented or undocumented, we feel very low right now,” she said. “So just being able to just see that, and him being able to speak about it, is going to express how all Latinos feel during this time …. And just being able to … showcase that, is going to make people that don’t have a voice be seen and heard.”

Bad Bunny’s performance is a moment of “visibility,” Erikka Goslin, executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño, said. The group is hosting a Super Bowl watch party with the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

The museum has hosted a Super Bowl watch party for the past two years. This year, its president and CEO, Ashley Jordan, proposed to Goslin that the two organizations collaborate on an event at Taller Puertorriqueño in honor of Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

“It’s about celebration and joy and coming together, but the personal is political,” Goslin said of the upcoming performance. “Puerto Rico is the oldest colony, and we cannot, you can’t extricate that from the performance that we’re going to see [Sunday] night. So I think that it’s celebratory, it’s a moment for coming together in love and joy, but it’s also political, and it is to show our strength and our humanity.”